Creating a fictional character is a little like giving birth. You can look at all the ultrasounds you want beforehand, but you don’t really know what you’ve given the world until that person emerges into the light.

Lately it seems like there’s been a lot of attention in the media about the virtues of failure. The trope quite simply goes something like this: You learn more from failure (about yourself, about whatever it is you failed at, about life itself) than you read more